Comey friend: Flynn memo was not classified

A close friend of former FBI Director James Comey — who helped reveal Comey's uncomfortable Oval Office interactions with the president — says the memo he described to The New York Times chronicling the encounter "has never to my knowledge been classified."

"Jim Comey never gave me a memo that was classified; and the memo whose substance I passed on [to] the Times has never to my knowledge been classified," Daniel Richman, a longtime adviser to Comey and a Columbia University law professor, told POLITICO.

Story Continued Below

Richman's comments are something of a rebuttal to President Donald Trump's accusation Monday morning that Comey broke the law by leaking classified information to reporters.

“James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media,” Trump said on Twitter. “That is so illegal!”

At issue are a series of memos Comey wrote before Trump fired him on May 9, cataloguing his meetings and phone calls with Trump.

In one of those memos, Comey described what he believed to be pressure from Trump to back off an investigation into Trump ally and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey recounted the conversation with Trump — which occurred in the Oval Office in February — during testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in May.

Richman's comment also comes after a report that indicated some of the details in Comey's memos appear to have been classified.

But a source with knowledge of the memos said several of them appear to have been "retroactively classified," and it's unclear whether any of those details were shared with anyone without a proper clearance.

The source said it was also unclear whether the memos that were retroactively classified included one in which Comey says Trump encouraged him to end the FBI’s investigation into Flynn. That's the memo that Richman described to the Times and that he says was not classified at the time he shared its contents.

Whether that particular memo has been retroactively classified will be a key question as Comey faces attacksfrom President Donald Trump and his supporters, who are now accusing him of mishandling classified information.

At least one of Comey’s memos remains unclassified, the source with knowledge told POLITICO.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday he had “no evidence” that Comey disclosed classified information. His panel has been seeking to review the memos, and Warner said he expects to do so “very shortly.”

“There are very few people that would know better how to draft a memo so it wouldn’t fall in the classified area than Jim Comey,” Warner said. He added that if there were “after-the-fact” classifications, that he wants to get to the bottom of who made those decisions.

The Hill newspaper first reported that some of Comey's memos have been determined to contain classified information. Comey acknowledged in testimony last month before Congress that some of the memos were about classified conversations, but he said the memo about Flynn was specifically written in a way that would not “trigger a classification.”

POLITICO Playbook newsletter

Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics

Email

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.

As FBI director, Comey would have been the agency’s original classification authority, giving him control over which of the agency’s records were classified and which were not.

Benjamin Wittes, editor of the Lawfare blog and a friend of Comey’s, defended the former FBI director on Twitter Monday, and argued againstTrump’s claim that Comey leaked classified information.

Wittes’ assessment is notable because he was among the first Comey associates to corroborate the substance of the memos, suggesting he learned similar details about Trump’s interactions with Comey from his private conversations with him.